Proposal Passive days

The idea:
To mark a certain date per week/month dedicated to 'pausing' Baystation to allow for long, passive rounds.
The rounds would not allow having antagonists, minimize unexpected job duties (emergency engineering/medical/sec, etc.) and allow for players to develop their characters or departments either through the RP they want to have or just through department affairs.
These rounds could allow ample time for:
-department training
-speeches/lectures
-disciplinaries
-physical training
-random mini-events around the torch like a party or TV interviews
-SCGR and CL to do as much as they please without worrying about the more important matters of the average round
-actor role to be used best

And any other ideas you have.

The arguments:
Allow me to neutralize these so you get the gist of what this is aiming to accomplish whilst answering as few questions as possible.
You probably read the title and thought these three things first, so don't get the wrong idea here:

Extended rounds are just that - extended. They're still two or three hours long at minimum, and practically everyone is invested in a job or plot of some kind for the first two hours. Remember all of those lacklustre funerals? The lack of justice for the worst traitors and the most injured? What about those times where you wish you could just properly train people in a department? Now, assuming everyone is willing to get this going, you'll have around forty minutes to prepare, tell everyone to dress nice and actually arrive there. You wish you could punish the latest ones, but it's the next round in five minutes. And even if you get people to extend the round via vote - that's thirty minutes of people cramming as much as they can, before hoping more time is granted while most of the playerbase is waiting for it to end.

For me? Nah. I think more about those people who sit up in the lounge/sauna to privately RP their bsns. What I mean is a day where people can spend as much time as they want to engage in roleplay however they wish, without worrying about antags or jobs. Besides, it's clear most people are here for RP. Why not dedicate something to it?

I can't tell your imagination how to think, but let me steer you in the right direction: think about all of those rooms and features you wish you could use.

Hohoho, the irony... Touché.
Being one of those rare creatures, with Extended being my favourite roundtype, I can't help but support the idea. Letting Engineering do its wacky megaprojects is perhaps the greatest incentive, plus I find Extended, even 3-hour Extended, to be too short.

How exactly would this be different from Extended, though? Round times are extended to 10 hours instead of 2? What about normal issues that arise like petty theft or accidental explosions because an engineering project went wrong—would these be banned during a Passive gamemode?

How exactly would this be different from Extended, though? Round times are extended to 10 hours instead of 2? What about normal issues that arise like petty theft or accidental explosions because an engineering project went wrong—would these be banned during a Passive gamemode?

A good idea that will never work, simply because of how Baystation's player base is diverse in what they expect from the game and how vast the interpretation and quality of the roleplay changes (for better or worse, mostly worse) from one person to the other.

Beautiful idea, but I agree with the point about the Baystation playerbase's diversity. There are some who favour mechanics over roleplay, and some who favour roleplay over mechanics. This is a beautiful idea, but it only pleases one of the two ideas (mechanics vs roleplay), and it likely wouldn't work out.

A rough example of this, although slightly unrelated topicwise, is the introduction of 2 hour rounds. There are many players whom were advocates for 2 hour rounds and complained about the length of 3 hour rounds, and now that they got their way the 3 hour round people are complaining just as loud. I feel like if this were to be a thing, you would have a large group of people opting not to play, and perhaps feeling like they could take their experience elsewhere in the SS13 community (though, this may be for the better).

Keeping that in mind as someone who likes to be the devil's advocate, I also think everything should be tried out once before calling it a scrapped plan. Making a psychological arguement and attempting to predict something not working in advance of even trying something while the idea is still on the drawing board seems like it's something that inhibits ideas from moving forward, so, I guess I'll say:

I actually think this idea is fine, and don't think it's some sort of rp vs action thing. You're better off selling it as "scheduled round types" instead, where there's a set schedule of rounds (maybe one or two days a week, 2-3 rounds each day) of pre-announced round type. Doesn't need to be just extended; can also include things like straight merc where it announces the mercs and so on, things which are maybe tolerable in small doses but otherwise appeal to a minority of players. This is more of an alternative to voting than it is an alternative to rounds where shit happens.

I also don't think it's an rp vs action thing, but for another reason. Since it'll be scheduled, or on a regular basis, it's very likely there will be staff, even in large amounts, throughout these rounds. They could run little events as they please. Naturally, not game-ending events which involve the entirety of the Torch, but smaller, localised challenges to overcome, such as a R-UST malfunction, a colony in distress, new anomalous artifacts being delivered to the Torch, and similar. RP-centred events as well: the arrival of a dignitary, stowaways, refugees, and whatever else. Extended doesn't have to be boring for those who are only here to click rather than to type. Of course, this type of round would have to be exempt from Rule 38.
Also, please don't run bluespace cascade events...?

I think, from what I gathered, Roth wants to hold these type of rounds in order to bring out a more fleshed out crew interaction revolving around SEV Torch instead of your everyday monolith-touching Vox blasting, exoplanet igniting adventures; so there's a degree of RP over Action thing in there, which I understand and support, because let's face it, majority of these characters are there to whack stuff, kill stuff, sabotage stuff or die to stuff with nothing going on between them, which I am speaking from experience as I've been trying to break and remove that habit from Exploration players while I was playing as a Pathfinder. And before everybody goes "Exploration is exploration, haha unga bunga woohoo" on me, no it's not limited to Exploration characters at all. (And that is actually feeding the problem.)

These kind of rounds would help the players flesh out their characters a bit better, get them to move, act and talk like proper not-so-one dimensional characters and maybe get rid of their bad habits by touching upon them in-character, educating them instead of memeing on them; but as I've mentioned in my first post, it's not everyone's cup of tea, and people will grow tired of it since they don't care about these type of interactions, or fleshing out characters. Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily, different strokes for different folks. Does it reflect bad upon other players when they're doing that, going as far as unpleasant interactions? Yes. Can you do something about it? Not really.

I think that's the core of the problem, but that's kinda derailing the proposal here. Anyway, like I said, player profile is the key point to consider here, and I don't think the majority would be comfortable or interested in this for long. I'm pretty sure it'll work the first couple of rounds, probably. But I doubt there'd be continuity.

I think, from what I gathered, Roth wants to hold these type of rounds in order to bring out a more fleshed out crew interaction revolving around SEV Torch instead of your everyday monolith-touching Vox blasting, exoplanet igniting adventures; so there's a degree of RP over Action thing in there, which I understand and support, because let's face it, majority of these characters are there to whack stuff, kill stuff, sabotage stuff or die to stuff with nothing going on between them, which I am speaking from experience as I've been trying to break and remove that habit from Exploration players while I was playing as a Pathfinder. And before everybody goes "Exploration is exploration, haha unga bunga woohoo" on me, no it's not limited to Exploration characters at all. (And that is actually feeding the problem.)

These kind of rounds would help the players flesh out their characters a bit better, get them to move, act and talk like proper not-so-one dimensional characters and maybe get rid of their bad habits by touching upon them in-character, educating them instead of memeing on them; but as I've mentioned in my first post, it's not everyone's cup of tea, and people will grow tired of it since they don't care about these type of interactions, or fleshing out characters. Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily, different strokes for different folks. Does it reflect bad upon other players when they're doing that, going as far as unpleasant interactions? Yes. Can you do something about it? Not really.

I think that's the core of the problem, but that's kinda derailing the proposal here. Anyway, like I said, player profile is the key point to consider here, and I don't think the majority would be comfortable or interested in this for long. I'm pretty sure it'll work the first couple of rounds, probably. But I doubt there'd be continuity.

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that's why it only comes around once every so often - some change of pace is needed but i wouldn't want to sacrifice every week for it

I think having a round like this once a month would be beautiful. Im a bit biased since extended has become one of my favorite round types, but i think that having it once a month would be great for the people who like the RP aspect and good for the people who like the mechanics aspect so they know when to avoid the server? If that makes sense.

In general, roleplay standards have improved significantly from the early days. I don't think many people realize how silly the server was way back in the day (outside of the local elite circlejerk). It wasn't unusual to play the game with characters like Urist McBeard, Herb Derpman, and Vlad Novampir. It also wasn't unusual for people to mail bombs to each other as a joke and then have the round end after 40 minutes or so. There were also times that a round lasted 24 hours+ too. I generally miss the levity mixed with hyper-lethality and the base assumption that Losing Is Fun the server used to have, but those times have passed.

As for this proposal in general? This stuff is nice for players that have been around for a long time, but generally long extended rounds are absolute pain for people who only play occasionally or new players that have no connections.

As for this proposal in general? This stuff is nice for players that have been around for a long time, but generally long extended rounds are absolute pain for people who only play occasionally or new players that have no connections.

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that's why i want it to be on certain days - so people can opt to skip that day or even check it out/rejoin for the first time because of it

Sounds like a fun way to lose the population for a full day which cascades to being lower on the hub and losing the population permanently.

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bay has lowpop all the time (well, had, before the virus spiked player count)
also, hub ranking means nothing for an HRP server like bay. Most of the people here are regulars who know exactly where to get their HRP fix